I founded Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc., an independent technology market intelligence company, in 2005. Previously, I was vice president of Client Computing at IDC, covering client PCs (desktop and mobile computers). Before that, I ran my own research and analysis firm, directed operations for a developer of multilingual text processing software, ran a technology analysis and publishing practice for a consulting company, managed international accounts for a data communications equipment manufacturer, and did new product development for a computerized trading network. I have published in a variety of forums and been quoted in a number of publications and other media outlets. I snagged a B.F.A. from Bennington College and an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. I am multilingual, world-traveled, and have bicycled over the Alps, but am now a family man.
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Gun Death Data Points In Both Directions

Bill, a lifeguard down at my health club, is from the West. His politics are far right for the neighborhood in which he’s actually abiding: the leafy suburbs west of Boston. He’s always raving on about liberals and freeloaders with that twangy accent of his. On Second Amendment, he’s pretty clear, and he lets everyone else in the club know at length and often to their great discomfort.

So, imagine my surprise the other day when I entered the pool area and he said straight off, “The answer is, I’m in favor of Massachusetts laws.”

I’m like, “What?”

“The answer to the question you’re about to ask is I’m in favor of Massachusetts state laws.”

It took me a minute, but this was the day after the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting in which 20 young children and six adults were killed by a deranged young man. He used a “consumer-grade” AR-15 semiautomatic assault weapon to wreak havoc on people whom he delusionally identified as being objects his that mother — whom he also assassinated by shooting her in the face a short time before — loved more than himself.

“Oh, you mean our gun laws,” I offered as helpfully as possible.

Now, this seemed odd to me, since Bill is hard right on about every subject you can name, and our gun laws are pretty strict. Bill has lived in Texas, Wyoming, and California and has nothing good to say about Massachusetts.

“Why do you even live here?” I once asked him.

“My wife,” he said, deeming no further explanation necessary. She’s a New England native.

So, I asked him, “Have you ever looked at the data?” He frowned. “The gun death data,” I prodded.

He admitted as how he hadn’t, which allowed me to launch into an explanation of a study I did a few years back. Given that gun death data is pretty stable, the study is still likely to be reasonably valid.

I had been sitting at table with two guys I can only identify as “gun nutters,” who were raving on about their arsenals and how safe they felt having all that weaponry close at hand.

Now, quick aside on my own firearms street cred. In my youth, I owned various weapons, most bought from questionable sources, but gave them up when Massachusetts laws tightened to the point where my armaments were clearly illegal. I believe one or two might have been missing serial numbers. Years later, in my 50s, I went hunting for my first and only time with a friend from Texas. It wasn’t much of a hunt: nice comfy stand in a tree a clear shot uprange from a feeding patch. I fired one bullet, a .243, and hit an underage faun in the head from about 100 yards. We tagged and cleaned it anyway, and later that day ate the tenderloin and a few other tasty bits in wine gravy with mushrooms. Without being a wild fan, I get hunting.

Listening to those two gun nutters ranting about how good they felt just knowing that they had the firepower to blow completely away anyone who had the misfortune to choose their house for a robbery attempt, I was absolutely sure that they wanted someone to try it just so they could experience the pure satisfaction of exercising their right to protect their property.

I decided to look into the relationship between gun ownership and gun death. A priori, I assumed that strict-gun-law states like mine would have lower gun-death rates than open-gun-law states like Texas and Wyoming. I figured less guns, less gun death, a pretty simple model.

I started with 30 years of homicide data from a handful of proxy states: California, Connecticut, Idaho, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New York, and Texas, courtesy of the Justice Department. I figured they were a good group, diverse, representative, some big, some small, some densely populated, some spread out. The number of homicides was originally gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in its Uniform Crime Reports, with characteristics of homicides (i.e., those committed with a gun) provided by the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. Some data was missing, but generally it was pretty clean.

From the FBI’s percentage of homicides committed with a gun, I derived the number of gun deaths by state. After that, I layered in some population data (I chose April 2000) to get a gun death rate normalized for population size. Naturally, Wyoming is going to have fewer gun deaths than California, but the number you’re looking for is the number of gun deaths per population. That gives you a good idea of the true gun violence level.

Last item: a measure of gun-control-law tightness. I read a lot of state gun laws, and they were pretty confusing, “must issue” and “may issue” issues raised their nasty heads, but in the end I got a kind of traffic-light-level measure: red for “open,” yellow for “moderate,” and green for “strict.” (I know, the gun nutters out there will say that there is no moderate, only “us’n” and “them’n,” but I labeled California — where a permit is not required to purchase firearms, but is required to possess a machine gun or an assault weapon, and carrying a concealed firearm requires a license — moderate.)

The good news is all the numbers are pretty small. Nevada, with 45 ten-thousandths of a percent, had the highest gun murder rate per population. That means that, on average, 45 people out of 1 million are shot to death in Nevada annually. And Nevada is an “open” gun-law state.

Texas, an “open” state, confirmed this view with a relatively high 36 per million gun-murder rate.

And Massachusetts, a “strict” state, had a nice low gun murder rate of less than 10 per million. So far, so good for the liberal thesis: more guns, more gun deaths; less guns, less gun deaths.

But first place in my little sweepstakes went to Idaho, an “open” state with a gun murder rate below 9 per million. Next door neighbor Montana, with similar gun laws also had a low rate of 13 per million.

Further analysis showed that New York, with “strict” gun laws, has a middle-to-high rate of 31 per million.

And California, with its “moderate” laws and gun-death rate of 43 per million, was just a notch below “open” Nevada.

Connecticut, where the recent school shooting took place, is a “strict” state, which turned out to have a mezzo-mezzo gun death rate of 19 per million.

My study was admittedly limited, more of a back-of-the-envelope estimate than a rigorous examination. All 50 states would need to be included in any follow on, and better methodology could be worked out to determine averages. But I suspect that the general conclusions would hold: the correlation between gun laws and gun deaths is low.

Now, before the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the gun manufacturing industry for which it fronts spring out of their chairs to do a victory dance, the one that celebrates the lack of definitive connection between gun laws and gun deaths and thus justifies any and all behavior, they should consider that there may be other factors that explain the data better.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, but if you look at the high-gun-death states — California, Nevada, New York, and Texas — and compare them to the low-gun-death states — Connecticut, Idaho, Massachusetts, and Montana — a factor that may be at work here is a measure I might call “population homogeneity,” which is just a fancy way of saying how similar people in an area are to their neighbors.

Mormon Idaho, with its open gun laws and low gun-death rate, is pretty homogeneous. New York, with its strict laws and high gun-death rate, is the nation’s melting pot. An easy subject for further study would be to do New York gun-death rates by county, which would likely find gun deaths disproportionately high in The City and underrepresented in the homogeneous rural counties.

There may be other factors as well: overall poverty, disparity of wealth, the presence and proportion of and relationships among various ethnic groups, and perhaps some measure of social stability like church attendance.

But I agree with Bill’s intuitive assessment of his own personal situation. Somehow, I just feel safer in a state with a stronger social fabric and less of a gun culture.

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Perhaps we need to do that when it comes to instructions such as written here as to how to use a gun in detail, to carry out or to complete suicide if you “google” “how to kill yourself with a gun”. That is what I did after I learned from the detective after learning my daughter had been searching the internet for months, finding her way out leaving me (her mother) 4 children and a spouse without his wife, thanks to FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Why not write productive information instead of this article as I have questioned twice before, leading those that suffer from bipolar or financial losses to read this horrific “how to”? Saturday was the anniversary of my now 40 forever death of my Alissa Faith my daughter my shadow, I wrote a petition on change.org, obtaining over 3,360 plus signatures online banning, sites videos You Tube, sending suicide supplies etc., Please Stop and Think! There is an EPIDEMIC proportions among adults & children. If you have lost or know anyone that has lost anyone or care, please contact me or change.org under criminal justice. “BAN SUICIDE INSTRUCTIONS…

There is a large and significant difference between “gun death rates” and “homicide rates,” as the former includes suicides, accidental deaths and others. In fact, New York state is among the lowest in gun death rates and Idaho is among the highest.

In additional fact, the top ten states for high gun death rates are all lax on gun controls. The lowest ten states for gun death rates have stricter gun controls.

There is one outlier: Vermont, which has lax gun controls and is below average in gun death rates. However, Vermont’s gun death rate is two to three times higher than its three neighboring states, all of which have stricter controls.

The NRA likes to focus just on homicide rates, as these impact metropolitan areas more. The above starts with this NRA perspective and then verifies it.

Interesting material, Jim. I’d have to see the data that confirms that, but it’s what I would have expected from the model. Good on you for pointing out the other categories of gun deaths other than homicide.

Jim, your claims about Vermont are patently false. In 2010 there were a grand total of 2 gun related homicides in Vermont, giving the state .3 gun-homicides per 100,000 people. That was the lowest in the entire country for that year. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl20.xls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state

In New York in the same time period there were 517 homicides by gun giving the state a rate of 2.7 per 100,000 people.

You should do your own research in depth, but here is another compilation, using a different year. Both this and the other source I cited earlier are using CDC data, the most respected source of mortality information.

http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=113&cat=2

The map on that age is also enlightening, showing how this is mostly a regional problem.

So, I did look further into your sources, Jim. And I found them fascinating. What stands out is most firearm deaths are suicides, by almost 2 to 1. My article looked at gun homicide rates, and perhaps my model was crude, but once the accidental discharge and self-inflicted (suicide) deaths by firearm are factored in, the rates line right up with the gun-law strictness spectrum, as the model would have predicted a priori. Conclusion: the mere presence of firearms makes them more likely to be used. With suicide added, Utah and Idaho don’t look so good, and New York doesn’t look so bad. And I’m happy to see my state, Massachusetts, at the very bottom of the gun-death rankings. Thank you for pointing out the CDC tables.

Roger, It’s good to see a blogger doing their research and trying to shed a light on some truths… I would like to add… If Massachusetts at the very bottom of gun-death rankings “because of their gun control measures”? Or are their other factors? I have found when looking at data there is no correlation between gun laws and crimes… including firearms deaths… It’s all over the place… and most of the “handgun murders” happen in large metropolitan areas and are “gang related”…

The Globe recently reported the following on Massachusetts gun control…

Massachusetts’ murder rate has risen much faster than that of its neighbors or the US rate since the 1998 firearms licensing bill.

In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, a striking increase from the 65 in 1998, said Fox, the Northeastern professor. Nationwide, such murders increased only 3 percent from 1999 to 2010, the CDC says.

There were increases in other crimes involving guns in Massachusetts, too. From 1998 to 2011, aggravated assaults with guns rose 26.7 percent. Robberies with firearms increased 20.7 percent during that period, according to an FBI analysis conducted for the Globe.

The rise in Massachusetts shootings extends beyond crime. All gunshot injuries not resulting in death, including accidents but excluding suicide attempts, increased 20 percent from 2001 to 2011, according to the state Department of Public Health. Across the country, the rise was 18 percent, the CDC reported.

The increases have occurred despite gun-control laws, passed in 1998, that state officials describe as among the nation’s toughest, with a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons, more stringent licensing requirements, and a mandate that firearms be stored safely.

They blame the lacked gun laws in neighboring States, but how can that explain the “increase”… Those states were there prior to 1998.